Portland had PGE Park, which hosted the Portland Beavers, a minor league baseball PCL team. When the owners announced that the Portland Timbers would join MLS in 2010, they spent about $30 million to renovate it and renamed it JENN-WELD Field (or whatever it’s called now). So not a new stadium, but certainly a new MLS team.
I can say that it has without question been a huge success. They have provided a huge boost to the surrounding neighborhood restaurants / bars / etc, and the people of Portland have embraced them whole-heartedly. For example, every single Timbers home game has sold out since they began play, 54 games and counting. It also hosts the female Portland Thorns, which have a much larger following than you would expect.
I read that now that MLS has folded Chivas USA, they want to put another team back in LA, even though they already have the Galaxy, but they want to build a new stadium instead of having them share one with the Galaxy.
Yeah, I was worried about that Cal game last Friday. My office is at 880 & 237 and I figured there was going to be one big fat mess with the normal commute traffic plus Cal fans coming down. I was right - took me 45 minutes to go about 1.1 miles across the game traffic to get on the freeway. Normally I would have worked from home, but it was quarter end so I had to show up in the war room.
At least the traffic wasn’t too bad once I reached the freeway. And yeah, free parking. I used to work on Patrick Henry and HATED the commute traffic on Great America. I can’t even imagine what it must be like before/after a game.
Downtown DC has boomed since the Verizon Center was built. The area around Nationals Park has been slower to develop, partly because the recession hit. There’s been progress in the last couple of years, though.
All I have to say on this issue is that the Sacramento city planners have got to be the worst on the planet. They literally can’t do a single thing right.
We got a new stadium for the Red Sox spring training. They successfully held themselves hostage. Jetblue Stadiumis a brand new facility out near the airport. They left the City of Palms Park vacant and it stayed that way until our local college recently restarted its sports program and signed a 10-year lease for the downtown facility. Now the Twins are jealous about the Sox getting all sorts of favor from the County and we’re doing multi-million dollar upgrades for Hammond Stadium for them. And these are just for spring training. Sure, other stuff gets to use them in non-spring times. But I still dislike the way the teams make local governments crawl and beg while fawning over how awesome the team is.
The problem, in cases like this, is that the so-called benefits of these sports stadiums to the local economy are nearly always based on figures touted by the very same team owners and public boosters who want to see the team stay, and who want to use tens or hundreds of millions in public money to make it happen. Most actual economists who study this stuff find very little economic benefit to the city as a whole from such projects.
A good book to read on the issue is Field of Schemes, which looks at some of the politics and economics behind public stadium financing. The authors of the book also have a companion website where they discuss ongoing efforts to provide public subsidies to multi-millionaire sports team owners.
It’s easy to walk around a new stadium, look at all the economic activity (bars, stores, entertainment, etc.) and at the crowds of gameday, and conclude that this must be a great benefit to the city. But in most cases, economists argue that, while a stadium can definitely bring prosperity to a particular pocket of the city, its overall impact on the local economy is often much less significant than it first appears. And if the owner got hundreds of millions in public money to build the stadium, it can actually be a net economic loss to the city.
Basically, stadiums tend to enrich the businesses nearby at the expense of other businesses in the city. In most cities, if you remove the sports team, the money that people were spending on ballgames doesn’t just disappear; it gets spent elsewhere in the city instead: movie theaters, other bars and restaurants, tourist attractions, shopping, etc., etc.
Even in cases like this…
…you can’t necessarily assume that it is the ballpark itself that is solely, or even primarily, responsible for the success of the area. I agree that the Giants did things right in one respect: they actually paid for the damn park themselves, rather than sucking a massive public donation out of the city (although they still get huge tax breaks not enjoyed by other private companies).
But while the presence of AT&T Park has certainly had an effect on the surrounding area, i’d have to see some serious economic analysis before i was convinced that the park itself is the reason for all the growth in the South of Market area in San Francisco.
The fact is that San Francisco has been, during the time since AT&T Park opened, an increasingly popular city (especially among the wealthy), with relatively strict zoning and building laws, and with very few places available for new residential construction. As more and more Google and Facebook and Apple and other tech employees making good money looked for somewhere to live, they increasingly looked at San Francisco, and the SoMa area was one of the few places in the city with room for residential and commercial growth. Now, San Francisco rents are, in many areas, the highest in the nation, and the median house/apartment price in the city just passed $1 million.
I guess it’s possible that all of these tech dudes and startup bros and venture capitalists chose SF as a place to live just because they could be near the Giants’ ballpark, but it seems pretty unlikely. AT&T Park, rather than being the engine or the cause of SoMa growth and development, is much more likely simply a happy confluence of circumstances, or even a symptom of San Francisco’s gentrification.
When I moved here in 1986, Austin was a mid-sized city of about 250,000. Now, we’re the 11th largest city in the USA, with over 600,000 people in the city proper and probably about 1.5 million in the greater metro area. We also have a sizable corporate presence.
So, in theory, we should be an attractive place for some kind of major sports franchise. But in reality, we aren’t, because the voters would never agree to pay for a stradium. Years back, Nolan Ryan wasn’t even able to get the city of Austin’s voters to pay for minor league park for his Express team (they play in the suburban town of Round Rock).
If Austinites wouldn’t even go for a minor league stadium, I don’t see them coughing up money for an MLB or NFL team.
I don’t live there, but I’m from Kansas City. Their MLS stadium was built with public funds, and has been a huge asset. It essentially created a new industry in the town. The market for soccer fans was very low when they played in Arrowhead - terrible atmosphere with a small soccer crowd there. Stick them in a much smaller, size-appropriate stadium, and the place is nuts. Interest in the team rose, revenue rose, payroll increased as a result, and they put a championship team on the field. Then they attracted the USA national HQ to relocate.
mhendo, I concur with your analysis. It seems there may be different alchemy that makes a stadium or arena work in different places.
In Sacramento, no one lives near the new area site, nor the proposed soccer stadium - ALL spectators will need to arrive via transit or driving. The current, and even proposed, transit structure is insufficient to handle a game-day crowd, and traffic will swamp the traffic grid. Traffic will be a major constraint should there be a game at both venues on the same day.
In SF there is at least a decent transit system in place. I am thinking we’ll see the same gridlock occurring near the 49ers new stadium, but in close quarters in downtown Sacramento, which will make it much worse.
You didn’t mention Columbus and Franklin County voters repeatedly voted down paying for it. One time around, they added it the ballot tied together with the funding for COTA (Central Ohio Transit Authority, i.e. the buses for the Columbus area), because COTA always did get the support they asked for. In a glorious example of the voters of Franklin County saying “What part of ‘Hell No!’ didn’t you understand?” They still voted it down. Which meant TPTB had to set up a special election/referendum to secure the funding for COTA.